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Yahoo has acquired a news summarization app Summly from British teen Nick D'Aloisio, the company announced Monday. Although Yahoo did not disclose the terms of the acquisition, AllThingsD reports Yahoo paid $30 million to the staff of three, mostly in cash with some company stock. Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, in her quest to make Yahoo "a predominantly mobile company,” has been buying up trendy mobile startups to pump some life into the company's services.
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The Summly news reading app was created by D’Aloisio when he was just 15, and frustrated by having to click through multiple news results while doing school work. The algorithm that powered D’Aloisio's iPhone app took articles from an RSS feed and trimmed them to fit on a mobile screen.
Summly originally started as a prototype app called Trimit, which soon got seed funding from Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-Shing’s investment firm. In no time, it had a range of high-profile investors including Ashton Kutcher, Stephen Fry and Zynga’s Mark Pincus.
D'Aloisio, now 17, tweeted the news to his fans.
@summly has signed an agreement to be acquired by Yahoo!! Excited for the next chapter of Summly! Thanks to all who have supported me.
— Nick D'Aloisio (@nickdaloisio) March 25, 2013Advertisement
Summly, one of Apple's Best Apps of 2012, has been removed from the Apple App Store. But D'Aloisio said in a statement that the removal is just a "power nap," and that the app's summarization technology will soon be integrated into multiple Yahoo products.
